


Finding and Waiting

by Orlha



Series: Drabbling in Narutoverse [10]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Experimental Style, F/M, Soulmates, Through Time and Space, soul promises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 11:42:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13950840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orlha/pseuds/Orlha
Summary: I’ll find you, he whispers. It is a promise of a thousand lifetimes, a promise etched into the fabric of his soul.She knows this. Their people have never treated soul promises lightly.I will be waiting, she tells him and he shudders, feeling the stitch of their promises in their souls.





	Finding and Waiting

He draws a breath, feeling the skin flake off as his body gives out on him. He turns. She is there on his right, fading just like him. She is beautiful even in death. He blinks slowly, letting the stir of chakra capture the sight of her hair, the memory of her fingers tangled with his.

 

 _I’ll find you,_ he whispers. It is a promise of a thousand lifetimes, a promise etched into the fabric of his soul.

 

She knows this. Their people have never treated soul promises lightly.

 

 _I will be waiting,_ she tells him and he shudders, feeling the stitch of their promises in their souls.

 

There isn’t much left of them. He breathes and lets the wind takes him away.

 

Then it is black.

 

* * *

 

He sees her on the battlefield. Her hair white like the moon had bathed in it. It’s not the correct colour but he falls for her all the same. She is twenty and he is eighteen. It doesn’t play out the way they had hoped. She is from another clan and he is from a rival clan.

 

Their clan member catch them when they try to steal away in the middle of the night. They are not forgiving to traitors.

 

He draws a breath, feeling the blood pool around him and he reaches out to her. She smiles.

 

 _I will find you,_ he promises.

 

 _I will be waiting,_ she agrees.

 

* * *

 

He _wakes_ up when he is six. Surged by an urgency for the missing piece, he disappears in the middle of the night.

 

He follows the beating of his heart, wandering the lands until his feet bleed. It takes him twelve years to find her this time. He is late.

 

She is eighty and he is only eighteen. He lets himself go when she goes.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t find her in time this round. He is a lord’s son and he sees her body hanging as a warning on the street. The war is coming to a close, his father’s advisors tell him. The dirty kunoichi deserved it.

 

He is too late again.

 

* * *

 

It takes him longer to _wake_ this time. Lifetimes of waking and sleeping and not finding her have dulled the sensation. He tries to remember her face, her voice. He doesn’t even remember his name.

 

His brother names him Sai. He names his brother Shin.

 

Is he human? Why does he feel his heart beating and pulling him this way?

 

He doesn’t understand any of it except that the beating hums happily at the sight of the girl. The girl is waiting. He tenses his legs, ready to jump out of the tree to greet her, but the person she’s waiting isn’t him. It’s a boy with hair and eyes black like his.

 

Danzo-sama tells him to kill her and take her place on the team. He willingly submits himself for punishment for failure. The girl, she is happy, and he doesn’t know why he’s okay with that. He waits for his turn even when the tugging on something inside him becomes unbearable at times.

 

He found her, but she isn’t waiting. This is his punishment for being late.

 

* * *

 

He guards her back faithfully. Sabotaging fellow root when they try to kill the hokage’s apprentice. Sometimes, he wonders if Danzo-sama has noticed. He thinks it’s not likely. Danzo-sama would have destroyed a poorly functioning tool if he knew.

 

And when Danzo-sama sends him to spy on the team, he takes it without any fuss.

 

He lets her notice him, waits for her to _wake_ up and she never does.  

 

 _Hag,_ he calls her. She broke their promise, she doesn’t deserve to be called anything else.

 

* * *

 

She hates him. She hates him so much that she would never willingly spend time with him. He is patient. Except sometimes, he wants to run his hand through her hair, wants to remember how her lips taste. How long has it been since then?

 

And when the Juubi wakes.

 

Sai fully remembers.

 

The war, the running, the annihilation that followed, the god tree, their duties and their failure to keep their duties.

 

He still doesn’t remember his name, but he remembers swinging her around in an odd dance, he remembers her singing, kissing her under the large leaves.

 

He draws a breath. He is not that man anymore and she is not that woman anymore.

 

Sai fights.

 

This juubi is _his_ fault. Not zetsu’s or Madara’s, _his._ And he’ll be damned if anyone else has to fix this.

 

* * *

 

He lies in a pool of his blood, too tired to do anything but stare at the blue sky. Would he forget everything this time now that the juubi is completely gone? Sai wonders if the stitches on his heart would disappear like a race long forgotten did.

 

Pink hair pops into his vision, her green eyes filled with a melange of emotions that he can’t decipher. She places a hand on his cheek as she heals his gut wound.

 

“I was waiting,” he tells her.

 

“I found you,” she says.

 

The stitches on his heart hum and when she captures his lips with hers, Sai thinks, he doesn’t need another lifetime.

 


End file.
